![]() ![]() We just redid stuff over and over and over - guitars, vocals, everything. ![]() “That was a hell of an experiment at the time,” Collen said. Finally, the takes were saturated with echoey reverb, giving the songs a stadium rock vibe, even without the low, booming tones of most hard rock. Then the drums were sampled individually and played through a Fairlight digital sampling synthesizer. ![]() All of the guitars were recorded on a Rockman amplifier and dozens of tracks were recorded and layered for every take. To give Hysteria a sound that would stand out from the rock records flooding the marketplace, Lange used a variety of technology. We worked on it for a long time and it cost lots of money, but eventually we got there.” And to be honest, Hysteria was a difficult record to make. Let’s make a rock version of that.’ Talk about a challenge. “He figured, ‘Well, that album's got six or seven hit singles on it. “His blueprint for Hysteria was Thriller,” recalled Collen. From the start, his goal was to help create the most commercial hard rock album of all time, and reaching that goal put everyone in a pressure chamber, from the engineers to the band members. There were both good and bad times while producer Mutt Lange - who had been with Def Leppard since their second album, 1981’s High ‘n’ Dry - worked on Hysteria. You enjoy the good times, and you stick together and help each other through the bad times.” We’ve been like a family, and things happen in any family. “People talk about ‘The Curse of Def Leppard,” and that’s so strange to me,” Collen said. Then, after they toured for Hysteria, guitarist Steve Clark died from an overdose. By the time it was released, Def Leppard’s drummer Rick Allen had lost his arm in a near-fatal car crash and the level of stress they were under while writing the songs made the band consider breaking up. Hysteria wasn’t an easy record for the band to make, and came to life only after some serious drama and soul-searching. And it proved that after a four-year wait for a new album, the public was still eager to embrace Def Leppard’s heavily processed sound. and UK album charts and went on to sell over 12 million copies in the States and over 20 million copies worldwide. Within days of its release, it was clear that others viewed it as a triumph as well. Even when we finished Hysteria we had no idea how it was going to do, but it felt like a triumph for us.” We just wanted to make a record with good songs that we really liked and that were maybe a little more polished and more modern sounding. We weren’t necessarily trying to top that because you can’t go into something saying, ‘Okay, yeah, this one’s going to sell more than 8million copies.’ That’s a lot of records. “When we started working on Hysteria we had just sold eight million records with Pyromania so we knew we had a fanbase. “We’ve always wanted to be a band for the people,” Collen says. ![]()
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